


Paolo and Francesca

by yuletide_archivist



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-23
Updated: 2004-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:11:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after her return to Oxford, Lyra faces a new temptation. A Lyra/Will story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paolo and Francesca

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LindaMarie

 

 

Lyra's temptation would have found her earlier had she and Pan not spent the day wandering the streets and alleyways of Oxford's quayside, breathing in the thick, vegetative smell of standing water, the scent of a summer river grown slow with weeds and waterborne debris. Lyra had walked all afternoon, as she usually did in July and in August, restless after the solstice; in windy autumn, in clouded winter, it was so much easier for her to lose herself in the alethiometry books Dame Hannah had lent her, to spend days staring, absorbed, at the tiny golden symbols that were so intimate and strange all at once. In the weeks after the hinge of midsummer, though, in the weeks after Will, she could not sit still in her rooms. In those days she could feel her heart beating all the way through her body, pulsing in her innermost self, and walking was the only thing that seemed to alleviate some of the excess energy that sparked through her like anbaric current along an unfixed wire. And so they wandered, Pan and she, through thick heat and desultory summer rain, until they exhausted themselves with walking and thinking. After they slept, they walked again, heading further and further afield from St. Sophia's, traveling in wandering circles from the center point of the Botanical Gardens.

At the end of the day that temptation came one last time, Lyra stopped by the river near dusk to lean against the railing of a low wooden dock. Pan climbed down her arm to stand on the rail, and the light from the swollen sun turned Pan's fur to a brightness like embers. Absently, Lyra stroked his thick marten fur as they both watched a much-mended Gyptian boat bobbing slowly in the nearly still current.

"Lyra," Pantalaimon said after a few moments, "Look over there."

Lyra turned her head to follow her daemon's fixed gaze. His head was raised and his nose twitching rapidly; she knew he was scenting as well as seeing. Although he could still see well, he couldn't see as well as he used to in his different forms, but he did not regret no longer being able to turn into a hawk or an owl to see over long distances, and neither did Lyra. After three years, Lyra's body, too, had shifted, but she and Pan still fit into each other in the natural way that bodies fit within themselves, bone to bone, flesh to flesh. Whenever she touched his fur, too, some part of her remembered the other fingers that had buried themselves in Pan's rich coat, and this was a memory neither of them would exchange for flight, for sharp eyesight, for any of the benefits another form could bring them.

Looking, Lyra saw what Pan sensed: flying gracefully towards them was a large bird, winter-white, out of place in the grey humidity of Oxford in August.

"Kaisa! Pan, it's Kaisa!" Lyra said, excited. On the railing, Pan gracefully raised his head, his dark little eyes glittering. Within moments the snow goose had quietly landed next to Pan, and the two daemons briefly touched their faces to each other. When Kaisa turned to Lyra, his eyes, too, were bright.

"Lyra Silvertongue. Sarafina Pekkala sends her greetings." the goose said, evenly, formally. This formality of address had been happening to Lyra more and more lately; even people who once knew her as a roof-climbing, troublesome tomboy spoke to her more deferently, or left more space between her body and theirs.

Lyra nodded to the snow goose, smiling. As she looked at his serene face, the slow, plunking sounds of the riverside seemed to fade beneath a deep, hollow whistle of wind slipping through cloud pine, of black silk rippling like a flag above bare arms. Winding himself around Lyra's neck, Pan shivered with delight.

"Kaisa," she said, "It is wonderful to see you." In another world, she would have thrown her arms around the solemn goose's neck in an instant, and buried her face along the oil-cool smoothness of his blue-tipped feathers. He looked no different to her, though years had passed. Did she look different to him, she wondered, or was the aging of humans accomplished so fast that he no longer noticed it, the way she took no notice if a blade of grass had grown the width of a fingernail? She gazed at his thick, strong form, so incongruous among the scrappy scavenger-birds that ringed the canal on their straggled wings. "But what are you doing here?" she asked, urged on by the thrum of curiosity she could feel pulsing in Pan's body.

Kaisa adjusted his stance with a flick of his right wing, then puffed his chest out slightly. "The angel Capthania has returned," he said, "and the last window is about to be sealed. Sarafina Pekkala invites you to come witness the end of the Closing."

Lyra felt Pan's muscles tense as her own did. The last window. The Closing of the North had taken longer than the angels, than anyone had thought it would; the tear in the polar sky had turned out to be more chasm than gash, a wound of seeping light that swept open from horizon to bright horizon, all paths in the marshy ground, now tangled over with flowering weeds, leading up and out into the empty streets of Cittagazze. Working in tandem with Serafina Pekkala and her clan, the angels had patiently folded the corners of the world-window in upon itself until the leaden winter light settled back over Bolvangar, back over Svalbard, back over the kingdom of Iorek Byrnison, which grew day by day as the ice expanded.

They had discovered, though, that Lord Asriel's rending had, indeed, exploded like a bomb. Lacking the subtlety of a knife-cut, the explosion had rippled through the north, leaving shrapnel holes in its wake, jagged windows into other worlds that peppered the Russian north, that shone in distant regions of the Inuits' land, some no bigger than a keyhole, some no bigger than a human heart. Lyra had read about this in the journals, all the time trying not to think of two things: Roger's face on the night of the rending and the possibility that part of her world still lay open to the worlds beyond, to Will's world.

Still, that possibility had remained in her mind, teasing the edges of her thought the way the reflection of a fountain-thrown coin shines at the edges of eyesight, a brilliance only visible when not directly apprehended. And now, it seemed, the coin was being snatched from the fountain altogether before she had time to look at it, to see the markings on its edge, to read the inscription stamped upon it in an unfamiliar alphabet.

"I didn't think they would find all of the holes so soon, " Lyra finally said to Kaisa. "When is the Closing going to happen?"

"Soon," the goose replied, then craned his neck down to remove a small, red flower from the leather pouch he wore around his neck. Lyra held out her hand, and he placed the flower gently onto her palm. Against her sweaty, overhot skin, the tiny petals felt remarkably cool. "I'm afraid you must decide by tomorrow morning. If you would like to witness the Closing, use the flower to call Serafina Pekkala, and she will send her sisters for you. If you do not call by the time the sun has reached its zenith here, she will know you do not wish to come."

Lyra nodded, her blood racing.

Kaisa gave her one last, deep look. "Serafina Pekkala knows that you may not wish to watch the final Closing. You of all people deserve to bear witness to this act, but you must choose as your heart leads you. Farewell, Lyra Silvertongue."

As Lyra watched the snow goose wing northwards over Oxford, she could feel Pan's paws pressing into her chest, closing over her heart, protective.

***

At St. Sophia's that evening, the sunset lingered as a sanguine cast against the walls and crowded bookcases of Lyra's dormitory room, building nests of shadow all along her book-strewn desk. The alethiometer lay in her loose grasp, its spidery hands sweeping smoothly, lazily from symbol to symbol, unmoored from meaning. Lyra could now read basic messages - the likelihood of rain, the general mood of one of her classmates - but the question she had now would require clambering down many rungs of meaning that she had not yet mastered. Remembering the ease with which she once consulted the alethiometer, she, too, felt unmoored, adrift in a sea made more of Dust than of water, unable to sense the currents to know which ones would bring her to shore.

"There's still a window open, Pan, " she said quietly.

Her daemon slid from her neck to sit on the desk, and looked up at her. "What would you do with a window, anyway? You're not going to go to other worlds anymore."

"En't I?" The words were out of her mouth before she even realized it. Pan butted his smooth head against her wrist. "No, you're right, I en't. But..."

She would have kept speaking, but there was no language to express what she wanted to say. It was for this reason, really, that she had never spoken too deeply about windows, about Will with any of the girls she had met at St. Sophia's. How would they ever understand, even by analogy? After class one day, she and Nina, her closest friend at school, Nina with her serious demeanor and Tartar braids, had found a baby sparrow fallen from its nest. When Lyra had gone to pick it up, Nina had grabbed her arm to stop her. Didn't Lyra know that a mother bird would never accept its baby back once it had been touched by human hands? Once touched, it was forever marked, forever changed. Lyra understood this as if by instinct. Some days it felt as though her chest had been laid open, and Will had stroked her still beating heart gently with his fingertips, and that this heart that now lay in her chest, sewn back into its solitary chamber, was forever altered by his touch.

If a window still existed, though, how wonderful it would be to stick her arm through it, her hand, even just her fingertips! She could touch atoms that Will, too, might have touched, that he might touch in the future; maybe the window that was left even led to his world. But, if it did, how could she watch it close, watch the last link shrink between the neat pinch of an angel's translucent fingers? For the past three summers she had stayed on their bench from dawn to dusk, imagining their selves, their bodies as two roentgens laid on top of each other, luminous images of bone and tissue overlapping, intertwining, but never truly touching. If she could touch just one atom that he had touched, wouldn't she want to?

Pan was still nuzzling at her wrist, mewing softly, occasionally licking her fingers. He knew what she wanted to ask of him, what she had not yet asked of him, and answered her before she spoke.

"Tonight, then. When you're sleeping. I'll show you."

***

It had taken Lyra so long to lull into sleep that at first she was not certain if she was even dreaming; Pantalaimon had started whispering to her, and as his words blurred, vowels and obstruents dropped away until she all she could hear was the susurration of sibilant slipping into sibilant, the whir of wind and branches. When Lyra opened her eyes, the familiar jumble of books and clothes had vanished, and she was sitting not in her bed but on a bank of snow beneath a canopy of fine-needled trees. As she sifted a handful of snow through her fingers, though, it was warm to the touch -- it was not snow at all, but sand. When she opened her fingers, it dusted upwards into the wind in a glittery skirl, trailing up between wind-blown branches that swayed and curled with spineless ease.

This entire world, it seemed, was in motion. Snow-sand whirled into air, glinting a in mica shimmer beneath a lambent moon, and branches of the trees whirled, too, sending sand cascading back to the gently sloped ground. Lyra could see no animals moving on the ground, but rising and falling on the currents rode tiny, squirrel-like creatures, their fur as glistening white as the ground. Casting themselves from one curving branch of the tree to the next, they spread their light, webbed limbs and rode the wind currents, filaments of their feather-like fur trailing gracefully out behind them.

From time to time, they would land gently on the ground, and their travels seemed to follow great circular arcs through the air, up and down. In the space of a breath, the creatures all cast themselves upwards along the wind, and Lyra saw two cats, their fur rippling in the breeze, paw gently into the grove. No, not cats, Lyra thought, Lyra knew, not true cats but rather Pantalaimon and Kirjava, cat shaped, wandering worlds while Lyra and Will sat listening to Mary Malone tell them of marchpane. Sensing the world with Pan, Lyra trembled at the joy of the fresh wind at her face, at the play of Kirjava's fur against her own.

For a few moments, Lyra and the cats watched the riders, who had resumed their flights slightly higher up in the trees. The enormous, milky disk of the moon lent the creatures a luminescence, and they glided, aglow, in the deep, sweet night that smelled crisply of pine. Lyra thought suddenly of a passage she had read in a book by a long-dead Florentine, a book she was supposed to have read last winter term, but that in truth she had only skimmed between alethiometry lessons. The general story had appealed to her, though, as incorrect as it was about worlds beyond: the poet, lost in a dark wood, became separated from his daemon, Beatrice, and had to search through the kingdoms of the afterlife for her. In the first kingdom, in a hell where Beatrice, pure, could not step, the poet had encountered marvels of torment, layer upon layer of suffering ringing down into an abyss that would have haunted Lyra with its familiarity had she read that far. Not long into the poet's journey, though, he had encountered the sight of two lovers he had known in life, now set adrift forever on a fierce wind, their daemonless bodies forever aloft, forever entwined. Lyra had thought that this was not a terrible fate, to drift like that, forever connected, never apart. The riders of this strange world, their tails trailing against one another in the air, made her think of these lovers, united in their flight.

Pantalaimon must have remembered them, too, for when a fresh gust swept upwards through the grove, the cats' bodies changed, copying the forms of the creatures native to the wind-world, and Lyra felt herself inside of Pan, riding upwards on the wind, a small body entwining effortlessly with Kirjava's. In a moment, her daemon body dropped away, and she was Lyra again, Lyra rising and falling, spinning in the endless currents of air. And across from her, his hands entwined with hers, was Will. In the lunar light his longed-for face looked both young and old, witch-like, angelic; she seemed to see his child-self and adult-self all at once, and to feel her own body shift, as well, malleable, changing with the currents of the air. Wordless, weightless, they spun and floated as though in water; when their bare skin touched, arm grazing shoulder, lip brushing temple, the currents of air throbbed and gusted more strongly upward, lifting them to flight. Beneath the rush of the wind, Lyra thought she could hear a door swinging open somewhere deep within her. Looking at Will's serious face, seeing him through Pan, through Kirjava, she knew that this was only the first door; Pan would open many more, in time, and would show her all of the worlds and selves he and Kirjava had entered and become.

Even if she never touched another atom in Will's world, their own selves were already more entwined than any chemical bonds, fused together like white sand made glass.

Lyra flew with Will all night, body to body. When she woke, legs trembling, the taste of almonds lay in her mouth, thick and sweet as marchpane.

***

In the morning, having placed Serafina Pekkala's flower on the windowsill to dry, Lyra swept Pan gently into her arms and sat down at her desk. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she bent over the alethiometer and returned to the business of creating the Kingdom of Heaven.

 

 

 


End file.
